Plain Text

Table of Contents

Overview

Plain-Text formatted content is useful for subscribers who do not have an HTML supported email client.

Feature

Plain-text is very simple content. It does not support special tags like HTML for beautifying the text. It also does not support images, and therefore does not support open tracking. Plain-text is very basic, allowing you to enter in text and format with only spaces, line breaks, and characters.

The following are suggestions to improve readability of your Plain-Text messages:

When including a URL in your message, include two versions of the link: one without the HTTP:// followed by a version of the URL with HTTP:// portion. For example:

When you have tracking enabled, the URL with HTTP:// will be changed to a tracked link and will not be recognizable as the original URL. This method gives Plain-Text readers an opportunity to see the actual URL, or click on the tracked URL (if their browser changes the URLs to clickable links).

If you want to ensure line break formatting, be sure to enter a hard return at the end of every line. Email clients do not all wrap at the same character count, and other email software removes line breaks. Entering a line break every 65 characters will help to ensure browsers that support different line breaks will view the message with the same formatting.

Separate sections so it is clear that one topic is different from another. You could use a string of 20 or 30 underscores or asterisk to accomplish this, perhaps with a section header name in the middle. For example:

********** SECTION 1 TITLE ***********

Topic 1 Content

********** SECTION 2 TITLE ***********

Topic 2 Content

Since no bold, italics, fonts, and size options are available to provide visual clues, capitalize headlines and/or section titles so they are distinguishable from the rest of the story. For example: